PS VitaUpdateBlocker - Alternative to Charles Proxy Trick by IAmGhost

Following up on the recent PS Vita Exploit Games for Firmware 3.01 and 3.10, this weekend PlayStation Vita developer iAmGhost made available an alternative to the Charles Proxy Trick dubbed VitaUpdateBlocker for PS Vita homebrew users followed by v1.1 and v1.2 with details below.

Activating Your PlayStation / PS Vita TV Without Updating Guide

Activating and getting onto PSN are not the same thing. This will get you the former, which will let you play games you've purchased on PSN, including those with exploits. It will not let you sign on to PSN.

You will need:

A PlayStation/Vita TV (obviously). I'll be simply referring to this as the Vita TV from hereon out.

A PlayStation 3.

Some game you've bought from PSN (probably a firmware 3.18 exploit game).

If you're running Windows, I'd suggest using the download link under Portable Version.

Also if you're running Windows, when you run the program, if it asks if it should allow access via the firewall, the answer is yes (if you're running the Windows Firewall, it'll also pop up a User Account Control (UAC) dialog, to which you should approve).

On your PlayStation 3:

1. Download your PSN game onto your PlayStation 3.

On your Vita TV:

1. Set up your Vita TV as usual, setting it up with your PSN account, but not updating it. It's probably safest to disable automatic downloading of firmware updates while the network cable's unplugged ()

5. Launch your game from newly downloaded game from Home. Congratulations! Your Vita TV on not-current firmware has now been activated on PSN!

6. You might as well revert the proxy settings from earlier so that you don't have to keep running the proxy (set Proxy Server: Do Not Use).

On your computer:

1. You can close VitaUpdateBlocker now.

2. You can delete it too, but it might come in handy later (see below).

On your Vita TV:

1. Why are you still reading this? Start having fun!

Notes:

If you need, you should also be able to copy any other content onto your Vita TV (such as exploit game save files), especially since you can also take advantage of this mechanism to connect your Vita TV to a computer running OpenCMA.

Miscellaneous musings:

I'm sorry if you've updated your Vita TV to firmware 3.30, thinking that your firmware 3.18 Vita TV couldn't have an exploit on it. I cobbled this together less than an hour ago, after spending a few hours trying to figure out how to activate a Vita TV that's not on current firmware.

Those of us with Vita TVs have found that activating the Vita TV has been a confluence of a few problems (below).

The usual way of activating a Vita on older firmware is to put it in airplane mode, plug launch it against OpenCMA connected via USB, switch that USB cable to a PlayStation 3, then copy over a game. But the Vita TV doesn't offer a USB transfer mode.

The Vita TV does have a memory card slot. But a game activated on a different Vita isn't able to activate a Vita TV's PSN account.

The Vita TV can try to connect to a PlayStation 3 or a computer running CMA. But it checks for an Internet connection to check for a firmware update, and refuses to connect if it can't connect to the Internet.

If you do manage to get it to connect to OpenCMA (honestly, I don't even remember how I pulled that one off now), and you restore a game backup... that doesn't activate a Vita TV's PSN account either.

This is when I remembered that with the OpenCMA method, the PlayStation 3 is responsible for tweaking the game so that it can activate the Vita... and that the PlayStation 3 still has network access during this time. So what happens if all that happens is the Vita TV can't check for updates, but everything else stays the same? Which is what this is. Huzzah!